A year ago, artist Beeple settled into a comfortable row with David Hockney and Jeff Koons. At an auction at Christie’s, he captured $69 million for an NFT, a blockchain-enabled certificate of ownership, of a digital artwork of his hand. With that, he promptly entered the top three living artists with the most expensive price tag.
Beeple thus launched an unprecedented boom in NFTs. Since then, $44 billion worth of NFTs has been traded.
But the hype obscures what makes NFTs potentially revolutionary.
We now hear the most about so-called ‘profile picture NFTs’. These are algorithm-generated profile pictures in a well-defined series. For example, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow and Justin Bieber bought profile pictures of bored monkeys in a hunting club. These types of NFTs generate so much hype because they play on all-too-human feelings around exclusivity, self-expression, and greed. I should know because I bought one myself from a crazy spaceman.
As a result, we now mainly pay attention to money-hungry smart people who piggyback on the NFT hype. In fact, I find it much more exciting to watch artists who have been toiling on their digital art for years and are suddenly able to sell it thanks to NFTs.
Artists like, ironically, Beeple. Or closer to home: Rik Oostenbroek. He has been making abstract and colorful art for eighteen years. But because his work only exists digitally and can therefore be copied endlessly, Oostenbroek was unable to sell it. He was forced to survive on advertising work and saw his art as a hobby.
American digital artist Kevin McCoy, one of the inventors of NFT technology, had the same problem. He therefore looked for a way to designate one of the potentially endless digital versions of his work as original. McCoy found the answer in the blockchain in 2014. You can then record that you are the owner of a certain digital file. You can trade this unique certificate of ownership with the blockchain – often Ethereum – affiliated currency. The NFT was born, and with it digital ownership.
Thanks to McCoy, colleague Oostenbroek can now sell his digital artworks for tens of thousands of euros each, dedicate his life to autonomous art and finally feels recognized as an artist.
The commercial and creative impulse that NFTs give to artists makes me hopeful for our cultural future. For example, makers can set per NFT which royalty percentage they want to receive on secondary sales. If someone sells an NFT from Beeple, the artist will receive ten percent. Don’t tell that to Hockney, who heads the top three. He sold a painting in 1973 for $18,000. 45 years later, Christie’s hammered the work off for $90 million. Hockney saw none of that. That unfairness can now come to an end.
Ernst-Jan Pfauth writes a column on this site every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of March 21, 2022